Beyond derivation: Creative use of noun class prefixation for both semantic and reference tracking purposes

Bantu languages are notorious for their noun class systems. Much of the research on Bantu noun classes has primarily focused on their formal properties and their usefulness for historical classification. Much less attention has been paid to the functions of the noun class system, particularly within a discourse context. While many scholars recognize that noun classes are at least partially semantically motivated and that they play a role in reference tracking, the complexities of the interactions between these functions and the ways speakers may manipulate the noun class system creatively within discourse has largely been ignored. This paper focuses on the behavior of the noun class system in a Bena (Bantu, G63) discourse context. I show that choice of noun class is a complex combination of factors, including (but not limited to) denotative and connotative semantics and discourse factors such as reference tracking and participant disambiguation. Further, this paper challenges the entire notion of noun class as an inherent feature of a Bantu noun. Instead, the class assigned to a particular entity emerges from the discourse context and prefixing elements are themselves referentially significant, serving to index particular entities (rather than simply inheriting their class from a controlling noun).